While Heaven Wept Take to the Seas
With intricate metallic composition and power/prog tendencies, While Heaven Wept’s third album, Vast Oceans Lacrymose (Cruz Del Sur), blends the high drama of European doom à la Paradise Lost with the technical savvy of American prog acts like Dream Theater. The Dale City, Virginia, six-piece (that’s two trios!), led by chief songwriter, guitarist, keyboardist and vocalist Tom Phillips, weave practically a whole album into 15-minute opening track, “The Furthest Shore,” which sets a tone of conflict and triumph for the rest of Vast Oceans Lacrymose to follow.
Harmonies abound on keyboards, guitars and vocals, with Phillips, lead vocalist Rain Irving and keyboardist Michelle Schrotz all contributing. Of course, as a double-guitar unit with a singer and keymaster, there is plenty of room for such things, provided the players are talented to pull it off, which in the case of While Heaven Wept, they are. One imagines that it’s Phillips’ role as main songwriter that keeps things together – difficult as it is to get five people other than yourself on the same page about anything (try it sometime if you never have) – but that’s conjecture on my part that only seems to make sense because of the complexity of the material, the amount of changes in the songs and the carefully hewn theater of a song like “Vessel.” In the context of many other albums, it might just be power metal, but While Heaven Wept keep too progressive a mindset for such simple labeling.
The instrumental, key-centric title track has a sound that makes me feel like I just beat a Final Fantasy game, but its decidedly epilogue-style vibe turns out to only be setup for the closing track, aptly titled “Epilogue,” which follows. Where “Vast Oceans Lacrymose” was a key-led five minutes, “Epilogue” is a key-only three (ocean sounds notwithstanding), and in combination – and especially after the energy of “Vessel” before them – the two tracks can be a lot to take if you’ve not yet been swept entirely off your feet. Nonetheless, crashing waves makes an appropriate ending for an album with “ocean” in its title.
As a matter of pure personal taste, I prefer the more straightforward attack of earlier track “To Wander the Void” or the gallop of “Living Sepulchre” to the big comedown at the close of Vast Oceans Lacrymose, but While Heaven Wept seem comfortable working in either context, with bassist Jim Hunter (ex-Revelation) and drummer Trevor Schrotz proving especially able to adapt to wherever the song is headed – Schrotz adds some killer double-bass work that propels “Living Sepulchre” into a different level of heavy entirely – but no one in any section of the band, rhythm or melody, having trouble keeping up. For what they’re doing, there isn’t really a weak link in While Heaven Wept, and far from falling on its ass, Vast Oceans Lacrymose pulls off its intricacy, its drama, its sudden shifts and turns, all while remaining, in its essence, a heavy album. It had been six years since the last While Heaven Wept CD, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of that time went into writing and arranging this one. Albums as far-reaching as Vast Oceans Lacrymose don’t just happen overnight.
Tags: Cruz Del Sur, Dale City, Virginia, While Heaven Wept
